Improving motivation and engagement Flashcards
What is employee engagement?
Definition gives 3 dimensions to employee engagement:
- Intellectual engagement- thinking hard about the job and how to do it better.
- Affective engagement- feeling positively about doing a job.
- Social engagement- actively taking opportunities to discuss work-related improvements with others at work.
What is the theme of engaged employees?
They have positive feelings towards their work, their colleagues and their organisation.
When is it impossible for an organisation to engage its employees more actively?
If they don’t have managers in all functions and at all levels seeking to communicate effectively, demonstrating that they value employees and working to establish positive relationships with colleagues.
What is motivation?
Motivation describes the factors that arouse, maintain and channel behaviour towards a goal.
What are the two ways to think about motivation at work and what causes it?
- Motivation can be the will to work due to enjoyment of the work itself. This implies that motivation comes from within an individual employee.
- An alternative view of motivation is that it is the will or desire to achieve a given target or goal that is the result of external factors, such as the promise of a reward, or to avoid the threat of punishment.
What is the relationship between employee engagement & motivation?
- One view- essential to align the values of the workforce & organisation as a central part of engaging & enthusing employees &creating positive attitudes to work, colleagues and the organisation. In such an environment, actions to motivate employees are more likely to be successful.
- Other view- engagement & motivation are inextricably linked & shouldn’t be seperated in the minds of managers. They believe and describe an employees attitude and satisfaction in the work environment. Therefore, both will determine whether employees will work to their full potential.
Motivation theories
Why are there different views, what are managers able to do if they identify the main reasons why their staff work?
- Many different views which differ because it is not clear why people work. Is it to gain money, enjoy social interaction or to fulfil personal needs such as achievement & recognition?
- If managers can identify the main reasons why staff work, they can determine how best to motivate them at work.
Motivation theory- Friedrich Taylor
What school?
What were his essential ideas
Scientific school.
- Motivation is an external factor achieved through money.
- Employees should be closely supervised and paid piece-rate.
- Time & motion studies determine efficient means of production and workers are trained and told how to operate.
Motivation Theories
Where was Mayo taught?
What were his key ideas?
Human Relations school.
- Brought sociological theory into management and accepted that employees could be motivated by meeting their social needs.
- More attention was given to the social dimension of work (e.g. communication, working as groups and consultation between managers and employees.
Motivation Theory- Maslow
What school of thought?
What were his essential ideas?
Neo- Human Relations School of Management
- Hilighted the importance of fulfilling psychological needs to improve employee performance.
- Motivation, according to Maslow and Herzberg, depended upon designing jobs to fulfil psychological needs.
What are key features of Taylorism?
- Work study- Measured & analysed the tasks necessary to complete the production process.- encouraged the division of labour & breaking down production into small tasks.
- Normal times- Identified the most efficient employees & the approaches they adopted.
- Equipment & training- given elementary training& clear instructions on their duties and equipment necessary to carry out their task the size changed with appropriateness of physique.
- Piece rate pay- employees paid according to the amount they produce.
What is the process of Taylors theory?
1) Study the work process to determine the most efficient production methods.
2) Observe and time the best workers in these methods.
3) Train the remaining workers to the same standard.
4) Implement the differential pay rates and close supervision to increase productivity.
Motivational theories- Taylor
Who was his views unpopular with?
Why was this?
What did his ideas result in?
- Unpopular with shop-floor employees.
- His systems forced them to work hard & by raising productivity levels, placed the jobs of the less efficient workers under threat.
- His approach raised efficiency & productivity- so businesses did not need as many employees.
- Ideas resulted in strikes & other forms of industrial action by dissatisfied workers.
What was a fundamental weakness of the Scientific School?
What did it lead to & what did this focus on?
- It ignored social needs of employees.
- Led to development of Human Relations School. It concentrated on the sociological aspects of work.
What was the Hawthorne effect?
What did researchers expect to happen & what actually happened?
- Research to examine the effects of changes in lighting on the productivity of workers.
- Researchers anticipated that improving lighting would increase productivity because giving workers better working conditions would allow them to work harder and earn more money.
- They found that productivity not only increased in the group given improved lighting but also among a group who’s lighting had not changed.
- It was apparent employees were responding to the level of attention they were recieving and because they were working together as part of a group.
As a result of the Hawthorne Effect, what did Mayo conclude that motivation was dependent on?
- The type of job being carried out & type of supervision given to the employee.
- Group relationships, group morale and the sense of work experienced by the individuals.
